Shannon Lee Dawdy ’88 had
seen this all before: city neighborhoods devastated, a daunting
job of rebuilding to come. The difference was that previously she had known New Orleans through
its historic disasters. This time, she was unearthing
the evidence of her favorite city’s
troubles in contemporary times.

Dawdy is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago and has done much
of her archaeological fieldwork in New Orleans. Between October and December 2005, she served as
a liaison between FEMA and Louisiana’s office of historic preservation, helping to develop
a database that incorporates historic maps of the city over the last 300 years and pinpoints archaeological
sites and significant architecture. She’s also provided advice on how to connect preservation
of New Orleans’ physical heritage with elements of its cultural heritage, such as Mardi Gras
Indian traditions and jazz.

Dawdy says that being onsite right after Katrina allowed her to grasp “the archaeological
perspective, the long-term view, that literally and figuratively, disasters are part of the ecology
of New Orleans.” She says past disasters helped the city readapt to its environment. “New
Orleans was wiped off the map twice in the eighteenth century,” she notes, “once by
a hurricane and once by a fire. There was also a terrible yellow fever epidemic.” After each
event, she says, residents rebuilt.

artifacts taken from the trashpit of a home rebuilt after the fire
of 1788.

But this time there was a long gap between major disasters, and she speculates that some past
lessons were lost. Building onto swampland, for example, is dangerous for a city below sea level,
surrounded by a buffer of wetlands.

Spending time with friends in New Orleans has allowed Dawdy to reconstruct more vividly what
she calls “the archaeology of emotion” surrounding past disasters. For instance, in
the 1990s she excavated a trashpit from a New Orleans home that burned in the fire of 1788. Most
of the artifacts she found in the pit were nearly new—they’d hardly been used. The
house was very rapidly rebuilt, the contract signed within a week.

Now, following Katrina, she sees that there is a significant emotional context to the way people
rebuild their structures and their lives. She tells of friends whose homes were lost to Hurricane
Katrina: “They didn’t even want to look at their stuff,” she says. “They
threw it all away or paid contractors to come and clear it out. After a disaster, the process of
going through things item by item, bleaching, repairing, refinishing, is endless. It keeps one
in a state of suspension between disaster and normalcy.”

In terms of historic preservation of buildings in New Orleans, Dawdy is relatively optimistic. “FEMA
has been quite conservative,” she says, “erring on the side of repair and restoration” rather
than rebuilding from the ground up. She is less sanguine about urban planning. “I’m
extremely anxious about the lack of vision and political leadership,” she says. “In
a way, the fact that the government can’t be relied on for help means that, difficult as
it may be, the distinctive
social fabric of New Orleans will be preserved, precisely because of the improvisational,
grassroots nature of the approach that will have to fill the void.”